February was another great month for Advanced Sports Logic. We took a chance to support dynasty and keeper leagues 12 months a year, and you, our customers, by your use and feedback have shown us we made the right decision. Sales have been steady, user activity high, and feedback to our support team has been positive.

In February, we implemented a major enhancement to The Machine and Trade Judge. Previously, our core mathematics did not account for the impact or the ability to run waivers each week of the season. As a result, The Machine and Trade Judge ran a process called “pseudo waivers” before any trade-related functions. The pseudo waivers process ran waivers recommendations for each team and then simulated an ideal set of waiver transactions for the league. This process was necessary so trade-related functions properly took into account which positions are easy to pick up on waivers such as kickers, versus positions that difficult to pick up on waivers such as running backs. This process was also time consuming.

We have eliminated the need for the pseudo waivers process by factoring the “free agent floor” into our probability distributions. For example, in the two figures below, you are able to see how the free agent floor impacts the probability distribution for a Def position in a typical Dynasty league with a 24 player roster:

Def Probability Distribution Before Enhancement

Def Probability Distribution After Enhancement

The blue curve shows that there are Def players available from waivers at around 5.6 fantasy points. Therefore, if your current Def player is ever projected to score less than 5.6 fantasy points, you are always able to pick one up from waivers, so a Def player below this threshold has no value.

Likewise, here are the same two curves for the RB position.

RB Probability Distribution Before Enhancement

RB Probability Distribution After Enhancement

Here you can see that in this keeper league, the available RB free agents are highly depleted and are available only at about 1.5 fantasy points. Now with these enhanced probability distributions, The Machine and Trade Judge understand that a RB projected to achieve 5 fantasy points is worth much more than a Def projected to achieve 6.5 fantasy points, without running the time consuming pseudo-waiver process.

In addition to making The Machine and Trade Judge smarter, we have also vastly improved the Trade Recommendations feature. Although this feature was designed for in-season use, many are finding the Trade Recommendations feature helpful in the dynasty leagues in the off-season. (Note: To run Trade Recommendations for a Dynasty League, you must put The Machine in In-Season mode.) Not only is the improved Trade Recommendations feature smarter and faster, but it also has a much improved progress bar and tells you exactly how many trades it has analyzed and how many more it has to go before it finishes.

Looking forward, we are currently receiving projections from Fantasy Sharks and working hard to update our projection front-end to bring these great projections into The Machine for blending with AccuScore.